1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a laptop computer for processing image data and an image-data-processing device thereof. More particularly, the present invention relates to a laptop computer for processing high resolution image data and an image-data-processing device thereof.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In the past, low resolution image-data-processing devices generated images with sizes approximately a few hundred kilobytes. Since the image resolution is not relatively high, the storage space and processing memory bandwidth requirement is correspondingly not high, and thus each frame of the images requiring storage may all subsequently be stored directly in the memory of the image-data-processing device. However, as image resolution increases, the storage space and processing memory bandwidth requirements of each frame of image also increases.
As shown in FIG. 1 of a block diagram of a conventional image-data-processing device 10, the conventional image-data-processing device 10 includes a data managing unit 20, an internal memory 21, an encoding module 22, and a communication interface 23, wherein the conventional image-data-processing device 10 communicates with external electronic devices such as a display 24 via the communication interface 23.
As shown in FIG. 1, the data managing unit 20 is connected to and receives first image data from an image sensor 30. The data managing unit 20 then transmits the first image data to the encoding module 22 to be converted into second image data, wherein the encoding module 22 via the data managing unit 20 and the communication interface 23 outputs the second image data for displaying or for any other purposes. In addition, the data managing unit 20 may also store the second image data in the internal memory 21 for future comparisons to be performed by the encoding module 22 during video encoding.
FIG. 2 illustrates a conventional laptop computer 40 which includes the conventional image-data-processing device 10 of FIG. 1. As shown in FIG. 2, the laptop computer 40 includes the conventional image-data-processing device 10, the image sensor 30, and a display 50. Due to the position of users relative to the conventional laptop computer 40, the image sensor 30 is usually disposed on the upper portions of the frame enclosing the display 50. The frame enclosing the display 50 is restricted within the dimension specifications of the laptop computer 40. The dimensions of the image-data-processing device 10 after packaging, in this regard, are also subject to the limitations of the dimension specifications imposed on the frame enclosing the display 50.
However, as image resolution increases, each frame of image data requires even more storage space and processing memory bandwidth. The storage space and corresponding processing memory bandwidth requirements of every first image data that is to be processed by the conventional image-data-processing device 10 are relatively large (minimum of at least few Megabytes). Accordingly therefore, when encoding high resolution video, the conventional image-data-processing device 10 would require relatively larger space to store the first image data.
In order to overcome the storage space difficulties, additional static random access memories (SRAM) may be added to the conventional image-data-processing device 10. However, with the addition of the SRAM, the dimensions of the conventional image-data-processing device 10 would correspondingly exceed the physical space available for accommodating the conventional image-data-processing device 10. Unfortunately, increases in image resolution are bound to correspondingly require the conventional image-data-processing device 10 to have greater capacity of memory for storing the image data. Under these circumstances, this means to increase the available memory space for storing data while simultaneously maintaining the existing physical dimensions of the image-data-processing device has become an important design aspect of the image-data-processing device.